Doc Deep dies during dive.

[Wookie]

35 cylinders. You would need 5,000 - 6,000 cuft of gas to do this dive, and to be safe, you'd really want double that amount. Sixty extra seconds at depth would add between 500-600 cuft to your gas bill.

Of course MY plan makes this more of a 25 hour run. HIS plan was for ~10 hours. If I found out a guy like this was on my boat, I'd cancel my charter.

thanks for the math, I didn't feel like calculating anything beyond ambient pressure at 540 PSI or so. So, if a minute takes 500-600 cubic feet of gas, and he's carrying 3 120's, and 4 80's, he isn't packing near enough gas for the ride, regardless of his bottom time.

 

[Akimbo]

Agreed, but if it was dropped by the dive operator, it's probably just a long line with a big-ass weight on the end; if it was sunk by a proper commercial outfit it might be fixed, giving more hassle to retrieve it.

I'm hard-pressed to think of what a proper commercial outfit would do differently. Bringing a barge out to bore or drive-in a mooring couldn't have been in the budget. I don't see how it would make any difference to the final product if a commercial or pleasure boat dumps a clump of scrap over the side (or off the stern) with a line tied to it. Getting it back is another matter, short of a bunch of guys with strong backs.

 

[Hetland]

My phone copy of vPlanner won't go deeper than 1000 ft, even there with a 4.8% O2 it's spitting out 747cuft.

I think I ran it on my desktop with VPM-BE, zero conservative adjustments, and that particular volume (5000-6000 cuft) was based on a .5 rvm. I re-ran it with a .4 at some point, and that put it just under 4000 cuft. Still just barely enough gas if every one of his tanks were 130's, his sac stayed below .4 at all points, and he perfectly executed the dive plan (an extra minute anywhere on the deeper portion would put him oog.

And what shape did he expect to be in when he finished a 10 hour dive, that should have been 25 at the barest minimum? He would have been better off spending 3 grand on a nice Colt Python, and eating it.

 

[Akimbo]

... Sixty extra seconds at depth would add between 500-600 cuft to your gas bill...

Does that account for added decompression? 1200' is 37.36 ATA so the actual extra minute spent on the bottom would only be the RMV x 37... say 28-56 Ft³. We usually figure around 1.5 Ft³/minute for a working sat diver, though the average is really a bit lower.

However I agree with your implied premise. A human can't pack enough gas to make an open-circuit touch & go dive to 1200' with any reasonable margin.

---------- Post added August 18th, 2015 at 09:28 AM ----------

... I think I ran it on my desktop with VPM-BE, zero conservative adjustments, and that particular volume (5000-6000 cuft) was based on a .5 rvm...

I doubt that a half a cubic foot RMV is enough to adequately ventilate the lungs at that depth. I can tell you from experience that just dressing in the bell before a lock out below 900' on HeO2 requires heavier breathing than that. A man in the water on Trimix has no chance of maintaining consciousness at that rate for very long due to CO2 and the respiratory work load.

 

[Redshift]

How much gas did the previous record holders take? He did have support down to 200' and would have had support again at 300 and something.

 

[Hetland]

I doubt that a half a cubic foot RMV is enough to adequately ventilate the lungs at that depth. I can tell you from experience that just dressing in the bell before a lock out below 900' on HeO2 requires heavier breathing than that. A man in the water on Trimix has no chance of maintaining consciousness at that rate for very long due to CO2 and the respiratory work load.

I tried to stack the deck in his favor with every variable.

Something else to consider: I'm guessing the temp at 1200ft is ~45ºF, and he was in a wetsuit. Probably didn't do much gas switching before he ran out or went to sleep.

 

[Jules Verne]

I take umbrage with the highlighted phrase. There is a point at which we have no right to control another's actions, no matter how ill-advised and stupid it may be.

You are right, I apologize for employing the loathsome passive voice, but it seems like the best choice to convey the existence of multiple causative agents without ascribing blame, as we are warned not to do in this forum.

Some of those causative agents are:

• The diver who bears ultimate responsibility for his actions;
• Instructors who have clearly failed in their responsibility to instruct both the letter and spirit of technical diving parameters and mindset;
• The dive shop owner/boat captain who failed in his responsibility to provide a safe diving experience for his customers and passengers;
• The community of us who bear a responsibility to one another to burst these ego bubbles before someone gets hurt.

---------- Post added August 18th, 2015 at 12:55 PM ----------

I’m hard-pressed to think of what a proper commercial outfit would do differently. Bringing a barge out to bore or drive-in a mooring couldn’t have been in the budget. I don’t see how it would make any difference to the final product if a commercial or pleasure boat dumps a clump of scrap over the side (or off the stern) with a line tied to it. Getting it back is another matter, short of a bunch of guys with strong backs.

The recovery vessels were on station this morning. I'll ask how the retrieval went when I get the chance but I assume it involved lift bags. The original line was supposedly affixed to a 250# anchor. Members of the retrieval team have saturation dive experience far below the depth that Dr. Garman was striving for.

You know what happens to deep water fish when they are brought to the surface too quickly right? Well, take a moment to have a kind thought for the team who are bringing him back.

 

[Akimbo]

I tried to stack the deck in his favor with every variable...

Fair enough.

... Something else to consider: I'm guessing the temp at 1200ft is ~45ºF, and he was in a wetsuit...

OK, let's stack the deck in his favor. Let's say the water temperature was 70° instead of 45°. A wetsuit at that depth is basically the same as compressed Neoprene in a DUI CF200 drysuit... which is how they discovered the process. That would give you the thermal insulation value of less than a 1mm suit at 30'. I don't know about you but I can't keep my RMV down to 1/2 Ft³ basically naked in 70° water.

Sidbar:
DUI started crushing their hot water heated wetsuits years before getting into the drysuit business. Most dive operations kept the suits in the chamber but they would absorb Helium just like the people. Locking the suits out (sending them to the surface) would cause the suits to blow up to about 3x and be destroyed.

I was on a project with very tight interior space so we stored the suits submerged in the lockout trunk and only pulled them out when dressing. By the end of the dive the suits were permanently crushed and we showed them to Dick Long a few weeks later. It not only solved the explosive suit decompression problem, it was an improvement since it reduced the lead we had to carry and increased flexibility. I suspect he also got some suits like this from classified US Navy operations. Insulation loss from permanent compression didn't mean much when you're dumping 2½ gallons of sea water into the suit at 110° F anyway.

 

[DevonDiver]

Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen much discussion about the psychology of 'group think'.

My article focuses on several psychological factors that might be viewed as early-stage links in the 'accident chain'.

Team psychology is particularly important to any accident analysis of a project of this type.

I personally believe that there is evidence of groupthink within the team.....and symptoms if that may be apparent in the social media, reports and responses emerging from the team before and after the fatality.

I think many have read my article, but I did update it today to describe group think, it's causes, symptoms and effects on a team...

A Fatal Attempt: Psychological Factors in the Failed World Depth Record Attempt 2015

 

[The Chairman]

If the news hasn't hit yet, I've been advised that his body has been recovered and the USCG has it.